An effective method for location privacy in ubiquitous computing

In ubiquitous computing environment, every service should have the characteristic of context-awareness. Since physical location is important information to grasp a user's context, the service provider should maintain the location information of the user to provide necessary service. When a malicious user acquires the location information of any other user, it is possible that he/she deduces the context of the user. Although there have been many researches for the problem, previous methods impose complex computation and many subjects requires on the system in order to gain acceptable anonymity. In this paper, we propose an effective method that protects the location privacy in ubiquitous computing environment. This method prohibits the malicious user from hijacking the location information by diffusing the information. It also confuses the attacker with transmitting dummy messages as normal users do.